Houdini (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780692991107)

Robert Carlton "Bob" Brown (1886-1959) was an American writer and publisher in many forms. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Brown was a bestselling fiction writer, selling hundreds of stories to magazines and collecting some of these for the collections What Happened to Mary? (1913) and The Remarkable Adventures of Christopher Poe (1913). By the end of the decade, he became a central figure of the Bohemian arts scene in Greenwich Village and published two books of poetry, Tahiti: 10 Rhythms (1915) and My Majonary (1916). After nearly a decade of traveling the globe, in 1928 Brown and his wife Rose joined the expatriate avant-garde in France, where he conducted his most famous and experimental works. These included 1450-1950 (1929), The Readies (1930), Words (1931), and Gems: A Censored Anthology (1931). In the 1930s, the Browns entered a new phase in their writing careers as bestselling cookbook authors and moved to Hollywood to write story treatments. Bob Brown spent the last years of his life in New York City, devoted to collecting rare books and publishing and collaborating with writers from the emerging Beat movement.


Craig Saper is the author of The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown (2016), Intimate Bureaucracies (2012), Networked Art (2001), and Artificial Mythologies (1997) and editor or co-editor of Electracy: Gregory L. Ulmer's Textshop Experiments (2015), Hyperrhiz's "Mapping Culture Multimodally" (2015), and special issues of Rhizomes on "Posthumography" (2010), "Imaging Place" (2009), and "Drifts" (2007). He also edited and introduced new editions of Bob Brown's Readies (2014), Words (2014), Gems (2014), and 1450-1950 (2015). Saper's curatorial projects include exhibits on Noigandres: Concrete Poetry in Brazil (1988), Assemblings (1997), Folkvine.org (2003-2006), and Typebound (2008). He is Professor of Language, Literacy & Culture at UMBC and co-founder of Electric Press.